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13 Conclusion Seeing People In one of his last collections of oral histories, Studs Terkel spoke to Harvard students and employees who had been involved in a campaign to increase wages for custodians, cooks, and other workers. One not surprising fact that emerges from these stories is that before the beginning of the campaign, the workers and the students were quite alienated from one another. Bob Kelly, a building manager at Harvard, said, “When I first came, I didn’t like the students at all. I resented them a great deal, and I just looked at them as wealthy snobs. They don’t see you. Some of them won’t speak to you. If they see you in the street, they don’t see you” (Terkel 2003, 301). As the campaign started, students and workers began relating to one another differently. Greg Halpern, one of the students who occupied Massachusetts Hall to protest Harvard’s labor policy, described the transition: I think students began to see custodians differently. When you look through someone, when you pass someone in the hallway and don’t make eye contact and you don’t say hi, and in four years you don’t go up and talk to the same person who cleans the dining hall or your room, you’re clearly not respecting them, you’re not thinking of them as a person. After the campaign, there were plenty of students who finally began to think of workers as people they could know. And so there were friendships formed. We have barbecues at my house now where workers come, and we go out together to bars or just hang out. That certainly never happened before. Maybe we earned their respect. (Ibid., 309) Kelly described the transition from the workers’ perspective: I’d notice those students working nights and days, they’d be here running off copies and have meetings all night. They’d be in here at seven-thirty in the morning, going out postering. They were doing something that they would gain nothing from. . . . The workers who did the work around the university, I noticed, got to like the 250 Chapter 13 students. Instead of “We’re taking care of spoiled little rich kids” it’s “Can you believe they’re doing this for us?” . . . Boy, people can surprise you. (Ibid., 301–302) As a result of the campaign, some social relationships and behaviors changed. Two groups of people from different backgrounds who did not relate to one another well came to feel a resonance. Both Kelly and Halpern describe this process in terms of coming to see the other. They began to treat one another like people, but the transition was not due to understanding one another’s reasons for action. Describing it as an improvement in mindreading clearly misses the point; the shift in the way the students and the workers were perceiving each other cannot be accounted for in the framework of Standard Folk Psychology. In fact, it becomes apparent in the interviews that neither side came to accurately know the others’ reasons for actions. Halpern suspects that the improved relationships between students and workers may be due to the students earning the workers’ respect. The workers were surprised by the students’ behavior and couldn’t believe what was happening. Kelly thinks that the students did not have anything tangible to gain from their actions, but when he asks himself what selfless action gives you, he suggests perhaps that the students gained hope. As the workers and students began to see one another as persons, their attitudes changed, and they noticed more similarities than differences. Liliana Lineares, a custodian at Harvard, said: What happened between the students and the workers was an emergence of a really tight relationship, a sort of common affection rose between us. Before the taking of Massachusetts Hall, I didn’t have this feeling. When it happened, when the sit-in happened, at first really nobody could believe it. It was almost like a form of salvation that the students had finally become conscious of our problems. Before the student strike, I definitely saw them as privileged people who were very different than me. After the sit-in, I saw that it wasn’t like that. (Ibid., 298) When alienated individuals come to see one another as persons, they see them as embedded in an environment, with personal relations, economic realities, past histories, personalities, moods, physical limitations, future goals, and social contexts. The students and...

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